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Futurist Amy Webb, of New York University, says the future of AI is very complicated and we need to ask — and answer — important questions about privacy and control.  She's written a book about it titled, "The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity."

The “Big Nine” include three in China, and six in the United States, which in the U.S. she calls “The G Mafia.” They are Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, IBM and Facebook. 

These U.S. companies are publicly traded and have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. “I don’t believe they are set up to intentionally harm humanity in any way, “ Webb said. “But we live in a free market economy and collaboration is not incentivized, competition is incentivized. And as a result, speed is prioritized over safety.”

While China has a consolidation of power over its companies, the U.S. has “no holistic viewpoint and nobody’s doing any long term thinking on this. I think we are in the middle of an explosion that’s happening in slow motion. There are changes happening all the time, and we just don’t recognize them,” Webb said. 

She said we need to think about who’s using our data, and why. “Everyday people aren’t aware of how much data is being scraped. Not just from email, Alexa currently knows who you are, and fairly soon, Alexa will be able to tell your emotional state. What is my right to emotional privacy?” Webb asks. “I would argue that we are facing deep uncertainty going forward, and deep uncertainty requires deep questions. And one of the drawbacks of our democratic system is that we don’t have any levers in place to pull to address questions like ‘who owns your face’? and ‘who owns your DNA?’” 

“There is a looming catastrophe … we have to stop talking about the future of artificial intelligence in the way it’s been framed, as robots coming to murder us, robots coming to take all our jobs, robots magically ushering in a world in which nobody has to work anymore because everything’s being done for us and we’re all living happy, fulfilled lives,” Webb said. “That is not the future. The future is much more complicated. And it’s on us to investigate that.”

“We need to be more skeptical… We are living through a period of unbelievable uncertainty. It requires us to not close our eyes and drift away just as the machines are waking up,” she concludes.

Amy Webb is a quantitative futurist and professor of strategic foresight at NYU Stern School of Business, and is the founder of the Future Today Institute. 

Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic moderated this Aspen Ideas Festival session on June 24, 2019, in Aspen, Colo. He created and hosted “Real Future,” a television series about the human side of technology. 

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Futurist Amy Webb speaks at the Aspen Ideas Festival about artificial intelligence and its impact on humanity. 

Aspen Ideas Festival: Thinking machines and the future of humanity

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